As the populations of Britain and America get ever fatter, so are people in China and India – in part thanks to the wealth generated by the West’s insatiable appetite for their indolence-inducing consumer goods and tech.
When I was growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, “portly” people were a constant source of derision. Cartoon, children’s book and slapstick movie characters from Fat Albert to Fred Flintstone, PC Plod to Augustus Gloop, and Fatty Arbuckle to Oliver Hardy, were always portrayed as slow, dim-witted, inept, greedy and generally laughable characters. This pop culture mockery invariably treacled its way into the playground, where overweight kids who didn’t pack a punch would be ridiculed, bullied and routinely called “fatty,” “fatso,” and “big tub of lard.”
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